The deepest hole in the world is currently the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia. Started in
1970, it was the result of a scientific project to drill as deep into the Earth’s crust as possible.
While the Soviet scientists working on the project did not meet their original 15,000m target,
the hole does reach an impressive 12,262m into the crust, when temperatures became so high
that the scientists were forced to abandon the project altogether. At this depth into the crust,
temperatures reached around 180℃, and the Soviet scientists reported the 2.7 billion year old rocks
behaving almost like plastic, which deformed the drill bits and made any further drilling
impossible. The drilling ceased in 1982, and the site was abandoned around a decade later,
and so all that remains now is an abandoned Soviet workstation.
Since 1989, the hole remains as the deepest point on Earth ever made by humans. The hole is so deep,
that some even claim that it reaches down to Hell, and that if one listens close enough,
one can hear the screams of the damned. Tangents aside, this leads us to a
question. It’s a weird one, to be sure, but the question must be asked: what exactly are holes?
Holes are, scientifically, strange little bastards. In ordinary language,
we talk about holes much like we talk about any other object: holes in Swiss cheese, holes in
buckets, and holes in my heart that I attempt to fill with drugs and self-deprecating humour.
We also talk about holes in order to explain certain things: the water leaked out from
the bucket because the bucket contained a hole. Clearly, we have the impression of seeing holes,
and we have a concept in language that corresponds with this impression. In some languages, there are
even words which pick out different types of holes: hollows or cavities or perforations.
If we asked anyone what a hole was, then we would likely receive a similar answer from most people,
and this seems like a good reason that holes exist in the world as we think they do.
However, a closer philosophical examination might show that holes do not really exist at all,
and that we have made them up as a convenient fiction.
So in this video, let’s waste some of our valuable time with the strange philosophy of holes.
If holes actually exist, then we would expect them to have spatiotemporal properties like any other
object. In other words, we expect holes to have a size, shape, and location. These are necessary
criteria for all physical objects, and what differentiates them from more abstract entities
like numbers and morality. If this is true, and holes actually have such properties,
then we have no problem. However, this would also make holes unlike any other object we know about,
for one simple reason: holes seem to be made of nothing. The hole might have other physical
stuff around it (like a donut), or it might have something that fills it (like water in a bucket),
but the hole itself does not seem to be made of anything. This is where the problems start,
and where the philosophers have something to sink their vampiric teeth into.
If holes really are made of nothing, then this creates a number of conundrums,
and these are the topic for today’s video. And before we begin I must stress:
these are real philosophers working on these very real and important issues.
Who ever said philosophy was a useless subject? These are the real questions that need answering!
The first problem comes with how we can actually perceive
holes. According to the philosopher John Locke, perception relies on causation. In other words,
objects in the world have certain material properties which cause our perceptions of them.
If I perceive a table to have a certain size and shape, this is because the table has the material
properties of being a certain size and shape. For those of you that have seen the video I made on
perception, Locke falls into the indirect realist gang. However, holes have no such properties,
because they are made of nothing, so it’s a puzzle how we can perceive them at all.
Unless we want to reject the standard causal theory of perception altogether, it seems as
though when we perceive a hole, it’s something of an illusion as to how we come to do so.
Second, it’s rather difficult to come up with any criteria as to what a hole actually
is. If holes really are made of nothing, then we cannot point to any material stuff
in order to identify what they are. But we also cannot point to anything surrounding
the hole in order to explain it either, because this is different from the actual hole itself.
If we imagine the hole in a donut, we can change the donut by taking a bite, but this presumably
would not change the hole. Similarly, we can remove the water from the hole in the bucket,
and it would still be a hole. So this creates an (admittedly ridiculous) problem for philosophers;
if we cannot look to the hole itself or anything that the hole exists in for its identity criteria,
then how can we even come to know what holes are in the first place?
Third, and most strange, there is a difficulty in what’s called the mereology of holes,
which is all about the relationship between the parts of things. We can demonstrate this with
a simple experiment. Imagine that I aim a gun at Richard Dawkins and miss, hitting the wall behind
him and creating a hole. There’s now one hole in the wall; that’s simple enough. But imagine that
I aim for him a second time and miss again, creating another hole. What do we have now?
It would seem like we have two holes, since two bullets went through the wall instead of Richard
Dawkins’ face. But it could also be that it’s a single hole made from two disconnected parts.
Just have a look at the intense debate online as to whether a plastic straw has one hole or two.
The correct answer, of course, is to not use plastic straws and to switch to a
more environmentally-forward drinking instrument.
Tangents aside, the mereological status of holes is something rather difficult to account for.
So, we have holes in Swiss cheese, 4,000 holes in Blackburn Lancashire,
and various issues with our common conception about holes and their properties.
If you have made it this far into a video problematizing the metaphysical status of holes,
then I salute you, and you probably deserve some answers. Philosophers have come up with several
ideas about what the metaphysical status of holes might be, but as with most things in philosophy,
there is very little consensus about which theory is actually correct.
On the one hand, we could bite the bullet and argue that holes actually do not exist. What we
are really talking about is holed objects. Holes are not really things in themselves,
and all our sentences about the existence of holes can be rephrased into sentences
which are used for the same purpose but lack the implication about their actual existence.
Basically, to hide them under a philosophical rug.
On the other hand, we could argue that holes are real things, but in reality are nothing over and
above the spatiotemporal coordinates in which they are found. Note that this is different
to the claim that holes are just areas of space, because areas of space on their own cannot move.
We need to include a time component to ensure that, when we move a donut from the donut box
and into our donut orifice, the hole moves with it and is not left behind in the box. On yet another
hand, we could argue that holes are a negative part of their positive material hosts. To return
to our mereological donut, this would entail that the donut is composed of a positive dough and a
negative hole, which would make it a strange sort of thing indeed, unlike anything else we know.
To summarize, philosophers have argued back and forth, but none of them really
has a bloody clue what a hole actually is. It’s such a weird and ridiculous idea
that something we are surrounded with all the time has such a debatable philosophical status.
Ah well, it's off to the Questionable Entities Games with them!
As for this video, that’s several minutes of your life wasted. I know what you are thinking:
this was a really unsatisfying conclusion to a video on a really boring topic.
Thank you very much for watching, peace and love, and I’ll see you in the next video.